JOHN SOWELL/The News-Review
Using a map, emergency dispatchers can easily track the location of police cars and fire engines using a GPS transmitter contained on the vehicles. Such tracking wasn't possible with the previous computer software system.

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Douglas County law enforcement and fire officials say the county’s ongoing transition to a new computer system is depriving them of information they need to respond to emergencies.

“It’s terrible,” Glide Rural Fire District Chief Dan Tilson said Monday. “Unless these problems get fixed, it could be disastrous.”

County officials say they are working to resume the flow of information and that installing new software to manage records generated by the sheriff’s office, jail, dispatch center and district attorney’s office wasn’t expected to be problem-free.

“This isn’t something that you can go and buy off the shelf and use it tomorrow,” the county’s information technology director, Kevin Potter, said. “People just need to be patient.”

During the transition, which has curtailed The News-Review’s Police and Fire Logs for more than three weeks, firefighters and police officers are receiving less information as they head to calls.

Fire and police chiefs across Douglas County said they are confident the problems will be worked out, but it’s uncertain when.

“They haven’t even come close to working out all the bugs with it,” Winston Police Chief Scott Gugel said.

The county recently purchased a $750,000 software system that links sheriff’s records, jail, police and fire dispatch records and the district attorney’s office.

Most of the system was provided by Executive Information Systems of Bethesda, Md., though part of the system used by the district attorney’s office came from Karpel Solutions from St. Louis.

EIS representatives have spent the past month at the Douglas County Courthouse working on the system and transferring information from the previous system, which was provided by Tiburon Inc. of San Ramon, Calif.

The Tiburon system was used for 16 years, but the company announced last year it would quit providing system upgrades at the end of March.

The transition is being conducted in stages. The district attorney’s office was the first to get the upgrade, several weeks ago, followed by the dispatch center. On Sunday, the jail made the conversion. Since then, the public has not been able to search jail records on the sheriff’s office website. The rest of the sheriff’s office has yet to make the switch.

Ten companies responded and county officials went through an extensive evaluation.

“Cost was a factor. Function was a factor. The ongoing maintenance and support costs over a 10-year period were also factored in,” Potter said.

Software systems are not designed to run seamlessly from the start, Potter said. They have to be enhanced to meet each customer’s specific needs, he said.

Emergency dispatchers have faced the most stress from the new system, Potter said. They’ve had to learn the workings of the new software at the same time that they answer incoming calls.

“We have to learn it live,” said Katy Stall, the county’s emergency communications manager.

Enhancements to the base system are being carried out on a priority basis. Issues that affect life, health and safety are given a higher priority than those that are more informational in nature, Potter said.

The county plans to eventually provide news outlets with more information about police and fire calls than they’ve received since the new dispatch system went into use Jan. 12, Potter said.